Why Yahoo Answers is a Waste of Time

There are few things as sad and depressing on the Internet than the clueless nature of the questions and answers on Yahoo answers.

Not all of them are terrible. For example, I encountered one question where a woman was asking what kind of perfume men liked. That's hardly a question indicative of a total raving moron. The answers, by virtue of being pure opinion, couldn't really be judged as "Good" or "Bad" but as ones you did with which you did not agree.

Chanel No 5 was popular, but most men seemed to like Vanilla.

Such survey questions aren't a problem. You're turning to the random masses of Yahoo Answers and asking them to tell you what they think is the best Rotisserie Chicken recipe, or what they consider the best means of baking chocolate chip cookies.

I'm also not really upset by the kids trying to cheat on their homework. It's downright entertaining to read a literal copy and past of a kid's homework. If you peruse the other questions they've asked you can often find entire take home exams.

Some of this blatant cheating is amusing, particularly when the cheater leaves out critical data, such as a chart referenced in the text of the question, or even phrases like "see pages 34 to 35" without so much as the title of the textbook.

Naturally, Yahoo deletes any answers where someone tells another to do their own homework. Just to be a jackass, I've taken to answering "42" to any math questions that consist of obvious cheating. Oddly, this answer is rarely deleted.

The folks seeking medical advice should annoy me, but to be blunt if you're asking Yahoo Answers about what heart medication you should be taking, then to be blunt, Dr. Darwin is holding on line 5, and you're looking for an angle for exiting the gene pool.

I'm often amazed at how many teenage and pre-teen girls are on Yahoo Answers seeking diet advice. Few if any of them are, by the numbers they post, overweight by any definition. Most of them are either anorexic, bulimic or just plain faking it. You'd think one of them would do a quick search and see that her questions had already been answered, but they go ahead and post the same question that's been asked 1,000 times before, apparently hoping for an answer they like. Perhaps they have futures in corporate management.

No, the nit-wits that annoy me the most are the ones who take the time to type up a question and submit it to Yahoo Answers, when a 30 second Google search turns up the solution.

Why is posting a question to Yahoo answers so much easier than going to Wikipedia or dictionary.com? Are they just writing easy questions so they can give their friends the 10 point "best answer" bonus?

Oh well, at least the political trolls keep it interesting. There's a certain pathetic humor to someone who desperately WANTS to be Rush Limbaugh, and has the raw, undulating hatred down pat, but fails miserably at the eloquence.